Lofland bLOG

This article was really fun:

Seems like maybe someone isn’t really thinking things through. This sounds a lot worse than drilling in Alaska.

Posted 4/30/2007 3:40 PM

1 Comment:

Yipes!
Posted 5/1/2007 12:05 PM by jonathan_camenisch

As a follow up to my previous blog about the ocean of information we live in

http://www.lofland.net/LoflandBLOG/2007/04/23/swim-dont-drink/

I wanted to mention AI. This is where artificial intelligence is going now. This is what we need it for. Currently we have many great tools for navigating the ocean of information. Google is one of those we think of first. Do many of you remember the days before Google? I used Alta Vista, which was set up by Digital to showcase how powerful their servers were. (Which makes the fact that Google has tended to use PC class equipment somewhat of an irony.) It did index the web, but that was about it. It was a real art to craft a search query that would get you what you wanted. Even then, it was hard to know if you got the “best” hits. Google revolutionized web searching. Now we don’t have home pages with lists of sites we found useful, some of us don’t even use bookmarks. We can count on Google to consistently find us good content.

Google is a hugely poor tool, though, considering how much information is out there. Consider these two questions:

Where can I find a florist in Oklahoma City?

If I buy a Garmin GPS receiver for my smartphone, and want to put maps of the Eastern half of the United States onto my smartphone’s SD card, how much space will it take?

The answers to both questions are contained in information alone. The answer to both questions are on the web. Google will answer one of them well, but not the other.

What we need from AI is not a computer to “think” for us, but for a computer to parse our human language and then use the ocean of information to bring answers. So while AI can never answer the question, “Which car will I enjoy driving the most?” (other than based on statistics), it will be able to answer, “How much fuel per month will I save driving a Miata versus driving a Subaru WRX?”

AI is not going to replace human creativity, but how much human time is wasted gathering answers from information? When AI can take over more and more of the jobs of gathering answers from information, then we can be more and more free to use our time on creative pursuits.

Posted 4/27/2007 2:01 PM

2 Comments:

I don’t have anything intelligent to add to this, but since you mention AI, there’s something that strikes me funny. Now that AI is no longer a buzzword we hear very much, it’s a successful tool we use in everyday life.
Posted 4/28/2007 12:57 PM by jonathan_camenisch

> I haven’t dug into it lately, but I’m not sure we really
> have a good definition for what AI is yet, so we don’t
> know if we’ve “achieved it” or not.

Well, let me know when you find a proper definition. But it seems to me that what Google does is present an artificial illusion of intelligence–just not as much intelligence as you are hoping for.

I don’t think we will ever be able to say someone has “achieved it.”

Oh, and SPAM filters also use some forms of artificial intelligence. Pretty crude compared to the cyborgs on T2 or whatever, but its aim is “intelligence.”
Posted 4/29/2007 8:16 AM by jonathan_camenisch

This is just a rant without much meaning.

Do you ever wonder why you even bother working?

AT&T is a big company, one of the biggest in America, and its CEO is retiring:

http://money.cnn.com/2007/04/27/news/newsmakers/att_whitacre/index.htm?postversion=2007042708

Now this is what he gets for NOT working:
According to a proxy filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Whitacre’s retirement package will include $24,000 in annual automobile benefits, $6,500 each year for “home security,” and $25,000 to cover his country-club fees, The Wall Street Journal said.

Now let me think about that. That means that he can buy my car sixteen times, per year! He can make my monthly house payment with the money he is spending on his “home security.” In less than four years he can buy my house for what he is paying for his country-club membership.

All in all, his retirement package is valued at $158.5 MILLION!

I can get a 5.5% interest rate on a savings account with over $100,000 in it, so if I put ONE million dollars in that, I can make 55,000 per year in INTEREST. I make a little more than that now, but my family could live off of that. And that is just a savings account, much better returns can be had on large sums like one million dollars through other investments.

In other words, I could live 158.5 lifetimes on what he will get for his retirement.

In other words, I am working 40 to 50 hours a week for really small potatoes. One starts to wonder why even bother? It is obvious that AT&T could set 158 (and a half) people free for life if their CEO could just be happy to live like “the rest of us.”

Just what am I working for, and just what are we paying for when we buy goods like phone service, cell phones, etc?

Honestly the whole thing just devalues money in general. If it is thrown around that freely, maybe it isn’t really worth anything after all. Maybe it isn’t even worth my time, and if money isn’t worth anyone’s time, then it isn’t worth anything at all.

Isn’t it interesting that everyone can pretty much think the same thing and yet all assume that everyone else thinks something else?

Adolescence is that way. Everyone thinks they are weird, and that everyone else thinks so, when really everyone is just thinking they are weird.

Actually, one thing that helped me as a teenager to get over my constant worry that everyone thought I was stupid was that my mom would just tell me that everyone was too busy thinking about themselves to think about me.

Anyway, apparently the city I live in has this complex. We all like our town, but we think each other all hate it. At least according to this article:

http://wichitaeagle.com/196/v-print/story/41448.html

Posted 4/26/2007 2:28 PM

1 Comment:

Yeah, except that with adolescence, adults get over the feeling, usually learn to not be very alive anymore, and look at you strangely when you talk about what you’re feeling. So people don’t usually talk about it: they get weird looks.
Posted 4/28/2007 3:48 PM by Godseeker23

. . . was a rather funny and deep line from Fiddler on the Roof that I think of often.

This is a good article on “liking” God:

http://www.boundless.org/2005/articles/a0001478.cfm

Posted 4/26/2007 2:19 PM

2 Comments:

Good essay. Thanks for the link.
Posted 4/27/2007 12:12 PM by jonathan_camenisch

Yeah, I talked with a guy a few days ago who had never ever known that God liked him. All his life! And he was the kind of God-follower you want to be like. He realized it that day. It was cool.
Posted 4/28/2007 3:53 PM by Godseeker23

This add made me laugh out loud:

When I saw “browse off-line” what came to mind was something to do with my new Smartphone, not a newspaper, and the way it states “IN PRINT” just makes me smile.

I should do more off-line browsing.
Posted 4/25/2007 1:18 PM

1 Comment:

Lol, that was good. But then, if it isn’t the Sabath, wouldn’t the Lord’s day be every day? And it was ok that we did all that since we did it “heartily, as unto the Lord.”
Posted 4/25/2007 9:55 PM by madhatterb78

American muscle cars are fun for a while, but it just gets old. Here is a fun little fact sheet that goes around the office email humor list periodically:

Acceleration, Put Into Perspective

Putting this all into perspective:
You are driving the average $140,000 Lingenfelter twin-turbo powered
Corvette Z06. Over a mile up the road, a Top Fuel dragster is staged &
ready to launch down a quarter-mile strip as you pass. You have the
advantage of a flying start. You run the ‘Vette hard up through the
gears and blast across the starting line & pass the dragster at an
honest 200 MPH. The ‘tree’ goes green for both of you at that moment.
The dragster launches & starts after you. You keep your foot down
hard, but you hear an incredibly brutal whine that sears your eardrums
& within 3 seconds the dragster catches & passes you. He beats you to
the finish line, a quarter-mile away from where you just passed him.
Think about it - from a standing start, the dragster had spotted you
200 MPH & not only caught, but nearly blasted you off the road when he
passed you within a mere 1320 foot long race! That, is acceleration!

Which is basically why I sold my Mustang GT and now drive a 1.6 liter Miata. The
horsepower game is just a matter of how much money you can pour into a given hole in
a given amount of time. There is always someone who has more money than you who can,
therefore, go faster.

I mean, after reading this, who really cares how fast your [insert
any car you please here] can do the quarter mile?

What that top fuel car cannot do, is turn.

After watching the presentation on “Shift Happens” about how exploding populations on China and India make America start to pale in comparison, here is another presentation to show us just how small we are:

The Size Of Our World

Juxtapose that with the fact that matter is mostly empty space filled with particles that are so small we can hardly imagine them, much less detect them, and it is clear that God is really into absolutely insane ranges of scale.

Posted 4/25/2007 8:09 AM

1 Comment:

No, I said Sunday. The Sabath was the day before.
Posted 4/25/2007 8:53 AM by madhatterb78

I have noticed that sometimes when you ssh into one system, and then try to ssh into another system from there, it hangs for a while during the login.

ssh hostname

If you TELNET into the first server and then SSH from there, it is MUCH faster!

using ssh -v hostname showed me that it was hanging when trying to set up X11 forwarding, so a quick fix was like this:

ssh -x hostname

And it should go much faster. This is especially noticeable in for loops like this:

for i in $(cat SystemList);do ssh -x $i ‘hostname;cat /etc/passwd’ >> output;done;less output;rm output

Currently Listening to The World As Best As I Remember It, Volume 1 by Rich Mullins

First, here is a very interesting presentation, if the link isn’t dead yet:

http://www.glumbert.com/media/shift

And then these facts:

“It took two centuries to fill the U.S. Library of Congress in Washington, DC, with more than 29 million books and periodicals, 2.7 million recordings, 12 million photographs, 4.8 million maps, and 57 million manuscripts. Today it takes about 15 minutes for the world to churn out an equivalent amount of new digital information. It does so about 100 times every day, for a grand total of 5 exabytes annually.” http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/jul05/1568

“The first disk drive in 1956 stored 2,000 bits per square inch. In disk drives today, the figure is as high as 135 billion bits per square inch. That’s almost a 70 million fold increase! And in the next 5 years, we will ship m ore disk drives than we shipped in the first 50 years.” - Currie Munce, Hitachi Global Storage Technologies

Our world has undergone a huge change, and we in it.

I remember hearing about a man who lived some centuries ago who had read everything available in print in several languages. That was entirely possible for someone who was literate enough , but more importantly, wealthy enough to do so.

Information was something you drank in. You drank it and it became a part of you. Universities would be a place full of books and people full of information from which you took it in. Like huge drinking fountains.

Today you can no longer drink information. It is as if drinking in the Ocean. No, instead we must navigate it. We must learn to swim in it, or drown in it. Universities, rather than drinking fountains, are now schools to teach SCUBA diving.

Dealing with information today is as different from the past as drinking a glass of water is from SCUBA diving. It is still water, but what we can and must do with it is totally different.

Posted 4/23/2007 10:34 AM

3 Comments:

Wow, I really like your description. Very poignant. And I completely agree about modern Universities. virtually all literary scholars have to come to grips with the fact that we will likely never come up with an original literary idea, and even for those who do, the vast majority of our academic lives will actually be spent sifting and swimming through mountains of other people’s theories, ideas and findings that we will then apply in our own way, to make our own arguments. It’s nuts. Comp I has for the most part been narrowed down to: teach them how to read, teach them how to find info (research) and regurgitate it back, in a format centered around citing sources (MLA/APA): thus the research paper. That is the basic building block of all language-oriented studies. It really tells you something. Good post.

Tegwen†
Posted 4/23/2007 11:24 AM by Tegwenava

Yes, how true. And who knows what to make of all this. I’m torn between the reality that the world is irreversibly changed and changing, and wondering if we should try to reverse some of the effects. For instance, all the swimming in the sea of information seems to make me an info-bulimic. I drink it in and spit it up, then drink in some more. It’s so hard to absorb anything.

And then there’s the problem of having to re-learn skills all the time as tools change. Programmers who mastered procedural programming soon had to get their heads around object-oriented programming (and few did, it seems), and now there’s functional programming, service-oriented, etc. In older arts, the discipline is stable. Accountants never have to re-learn the subtleties of credit and debit, because the concepts were set it stone long ago. Part of me longs for the day when today’s new things become old and stable, so we can figure out what it takes to master them.

Maybe these are “good” problems to have. But I don’t think our education prepares us well to handle it all. And who knows how it should?

I also think you like it. You’re the guy that likes learning new gadgets, and even overhauling your system of organizing your life. Maybe I should develop that taste. All the re-learning and revamping just seems like such an interruption. I would rather be creating something than re-learning my creative tools.

Hmmm. Maybe it’s the perfectionists who will drown in this ocean.
Posted 4/24/2007 8:01 AM by jonathan_camenisch

I have thought about this some more, and I have to post an amendment to my own comment. I’m realizing that I like this ocean of information too. I like it because we actually have tools to manage it well.

An example is my wife’s business website (rebeccassilverrose.com). We created that site last summer. It’s nothing big, not in the top 100 or 100,000 sites on the web. We’ve made hardly an effort to market the site, beyond designing it carefully and listing her business on Superpages and Google maps.

What’s amazing in this day and age is that people actually find the site! I mean people that are looking for a florist in Oklahoma City find it and get in touch with her through it.

In other words, we added our little drop to that sea of information, and some of those who have a valid interest actually find it! In 15-years-ago terms, that’s incredible.

So I like it. The efficiencies are astounding. I’m just overwhelmed by it all sometimes. I think that to keep our humanity and our sanity, we need to step away from it all sometimes, slow down, and drink in more of less, instead of so little of so much.
Posted 4/27/2007 12:23 PM by jonathan_camenisch

Currently Listening to The Joshua Tree by U2

I found this fun piece on a web site for people to rant against what they hate. This guy claims to live in the “bible belt” (which he properly uses as a derogatory term, as it was coined to be) and was ranting about what he hates about it. Mostly he was annoyed at the restrictions on when and where they can buy alcohol, but he had a fun story about the people that he runs into, or that run into him rather:

one evening a few months ago I realized I needed some milk for my cereal, so I put on some shorts and a tshirt and went to the grocery store. the tshirt happened to have a caffeine molecule on it, and the shorts, as shorts tend to do, left my calves uncovered, which displayed my two tattoos. milk in hand, I was waiting in the checkout line, minding my own business, when a pentecostal lady in line behind me (easily identifiable: they don’t cut their hair, don’t style it, don’t wear make-up (or earrings even I think?), and can’t wear pants, so they’re always wearing ankle-length denim skirts. [something about ‘not dressing as a man’]) taps me on the shoulder and says, “satan has a place ready for you.” … I’m sorry, what was that? “mutilating your body like that is a sin against god, as is the drugs you obviously take. you’re going to go to hell.”

Wow, just where do they find these people?

If you are a Christian, just remember that:
A. This may just be the stereotype you are working under.
B. If you even come close to coming across like this, you are way off base.

Posted 4/20/2007 12:27 PM

3 Comments:

Wow. Um, yeah.
Posted 4/21/2007 3:05 PM by Godseeker23

That’s one reason I shy away from witnessing to people.
Posted 4/21/2007 3:07 PM by Godseeker23
This reminds me of a story my friend Josh told me. He was working on a video project out at Disney MGM. It was a celebrity impersonator contest. Josh was standing at a door directing the traffic of female Elvises and George Bushes. One particular woman stood out. She was a Marilyn Monroe impersonator - in her sixties or seventies, I believe. According to Josh she was intentionally nasty. He had no idea how to respond when she started commenting on his tattoos. Reminding him that his body was a temple - and maybe something about the law forbidding marks on the body. Anyway. Josh really had no idea how to respond. The bitter irony of being verbally assaulted for your lack of morality - by Maryline Monroe - is just enough to make your head spin.
Posted 4/24/2007 9:53 PM by novisigothsorkangaroos

I was very gratified to receive this email recently:
_________________________________________________________
Subject: From: Mrs.Carolyn Trowells….
From: ariolak001@hawaii.rr.com
Date: Tue, April 17, 2007 5:25 pm
To: undisclosed-recipients:;

Hello,
I am Mrs. Carolyn Trowells a british citizen living in Ishikawa Japan.
I lost my family (Husband and Kid) in the quake disaster that happened
in Ishikawa Japan.
My late husband before his demise,deposited the sum of £7.5 Million
Pounds (Seven Million Five Hundred Thousand Pounds) with a Finance &
Trust Company in Europe. I just received a message from the company
stating that I am the sole beneficiary to this deposited funds.And
that, the funds are in a dormat status and needs to be
active/operational so as to enable them release and transfer this
funds to me as soon as possible.
I am presently in a hospital in Ishikawa Japan receiving medical
treatment. Due to my deteriorating state of health, I am not sure I
will be able to survive because I feel so much pain in my upper chest
region.

I am contacting you to help me carry out my last wishes.I have so much
faith in you and for this reason,I am entrusting this huge
responsibility on you.

1. I want you to claim on my behalf, the deposited funds.
2. I want you to build an orphanage home in your country with part of
the funds.
3. I want you to fund churches,mosques,less priviledges and the needy
most especially orphanage homes and widows.

Finally,you are to document all expenses incured during the
transaction.And you are to reimburse yourself as soon as the funds is
transfered to you.I took this decision because it is blessed to give
than to receive. I don’t want a situation where this money will be
used to carry out nefarious activities.I urge you to get back to me on
this and also hoping to hear that you are willing and ready to help me.

Sincerely,

Mrs. Xiang Li (Bed assistant).
for
Mrs.Carolyn Trowells

N.B:Please pardon me, I got your contact email address from a google
search for reputable individuals.
_________________________________________________________

I am a reputable individual!

Posted 4/20/2007 9:04 AM

2 Comments:

Yes, Google would certainly know if anybody does. I’m glad you’re getting some recognition!
Posted 4/21/2007 2:04 PM by jonathan_camenisch

Now that you have the text on your xanga - google will be able to tag you even more effectively! Yay!
Posted 4/24/2007 9:54 PM by novisigothsorkangaroos

The supreme court finally upheld the ban on “partial birth abortion” or rather, as it is correctly known: intact dilation and extraction.

Sounds like a huge win, right?

Maybe, or is it really just more right wing spin stupidity?

Here is my understanding: This does NOT stop abortions at any point. What it does is simply legislate a procedure. Instead of intact dilation and extraction, where they kill the little guy and pull him out whole, they must use “dilation and evacuation” where they kill him, then chop him up into little pieces first and then pull him out.

So, who wins? Nobody.

Maybe I am completely misunderstanding this, but it seems like they are just banning a specific procedure because it sounds bad, and thus requiring the use of another procedure that doesn’t have an inflammatory name (not a real name, but one put on it by protesters) like “partial birth” with no net reduction in abortions.

Actually, to add to the bazaar nature of this, I don’t think the law even mentions the procedure, but rather uses the words “partial birth” which is, well, not a medical term. So it seems up to a judge, somewhere, some day (soon I am sure) to set up case law to decide what “partial birth” means.

The use of spin terms, instead of medical terms in this law makes this whole thing that much more suspicious. It sounds like they just want to be able to put “passed the partial birth abortion ban” on their resume, even though the bill ranges from meaningless to dangerous.

Here is an article that goes into some of it, although it leaves a lot of questions unanswered and seems to start out with a bias in favor of abortion, although, again, it is hard to tell if they are in favor of abortion, or just against silly legislation:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5168163

I am interested in other views or corrections, but please, include citations. We can “talk” about it all day long, but this isn’t an opinion, there are facts there somewhere, if we can just unearth them from beneath all of the spin.

P.S. You may NOT cite anything from anyone associatd with Pat Robertson, or his ministries. I am afraid he lacks credibility.
Posted 4/18/2007 3:14 PM

2 Comments:

Interesting… didn’t think about it in those terms… To reply to your statement on my page, what about this: “Without repentance there can be no forgiveness…” Repentance requires an understanding of sin, and forgiveness is requisite to salvation (since we must be perfect… grace through faith). If there is no forgiveness, there is no salvation, and without repentance there cannot be forgiveness, and so it leads us inexorably to the final conclusion that without the understanding of sin there cannot be repentance, hence no forgiveness, hence no salvific state… Jesus told a parable about two men who were both forgiven their debts: One only owed $20 or so, while the other owed hundreds of thousands. Who would LOVE the one who forgave them more? The answer: the one who knew that he had the massive debt. The love comes from the understanding that they were forgiven of massive sin… It does not usually, unfortunately, come of its own accord, leading to repentance. Even so, the concept of sin is still understood by the feldgling believer. Two more cents in your direction. L8ers.
Posted 4/19/2007 5:53 PM by NathanKing

Ok, I read the NPR article, and from what I can tell a small battle has been won- however small. It does not stop abortions but it limits the inhumaniy in the abortion. Here’s what the article said:

[the bill] prohibits doctors from knowingly performing a “partial-birth abortion,” a procedure it defines as one in which the person performing the abortion “deliberately and intentionally vaginally delivers a living fetus until, in the case of a head-first presentation, the entire fetal head is outside the body of the mother, or, in the case of breech presentation, any part of the fetal trunk past the navel is outside the body of the mother.”

In other words they can NOT deliver the baby, alive, then kill it by puncturing it’s head (D&X). This is terrible and I am glad they aren’t allowed to do it any more.

So I’m guessing that this new laws implication is that the child must be killed while it is still inside the woumb (correct me if I’m wrong). The fact that this is legal at all is horrific, and I’m sure they could do just as much harm to a child in the woumb as they do out of it, but in some sense, I still feel like the law has limited the amount of brutality allowed. Also, because of the risk of lacerating the cervix there is a chance that some women would not have abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy. Even if this only saves a few, it’s something.

I think the bigest sign that this law does have some positive influence is the fact that pro-abortion lobiests are upset about it. As the article says:

“Abortion-rights backers say the ban is a first step toward trying to outlaw all abortions. Even some supporters of the ban say that if it is upheld, they could then move on to try to outlaw the far more common D&E procedure, whose description is nearly as unpleasant as that of the D&X.”

This is exactly what we want. Let’s pray that by God’s mercy, it will be the case.”

“Moreover, I saw under the sun that in the place of justice, even there was wickedness, and in the place of righteousness, even there was wickedness.” (Ecclesiastes 3:16) But I still believe that we should rejoice in any small steps that Justice can take in a world ever more given to sin.

“I said in my heart, God will judge the righteous and the wicked, for there is a time for every matter and for every work.” (Ecclesiastes 3:17)
Posted 4/24/2007 1:20 PM by Tegwenava

Gotta love Google!

(Be sure to click on the big “Getting Started with Google TiSP” button to read about how it works!)

http://www.google.com/tisp/

LOL
Posted 4/10/2007 12:59 PM

3 Comments:

Mmwoohahahaha!
Posted 4/11/2007 6:18 AM by jonathan_camenisch

Google is great… Esther believed it when I sent her information about Gmail Paper (http://mail.google.com/mail/help/paper/index.html).
Posted 4/11/2007 11:41 AM by midwifebethany

That’s funny.
Posted 4/11/2007 1:59 PM by Godseeker23

Thanks to Bethany for pointing out that CNN took down the article. Who knows how they decide what to leave for generations to come, and what to pull.

I found a similar article, so here goes again . . .

Just how far does the government need to go to protect our safety?

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/12/29/fs.asteroids/index.html

Now the real question I have, is are there any blinking lights on any of those asteroids?

Posted 4/7/2007 2:45 PM

1 Comment:

Wouldn’t an asteroid help a lot with the future over-population crisis?

Of course, I guess the same could be said of AIDS, bird flu, and world war III.

How can we even converse about such things without some kind of shared moral framework? I mean, do we really have any reason to be that the survival of our species matters at all? Or why should we care about our children and their children? Isn’t that mixing religion with government?

But I digress from your topic to one that’s been bugging me…
Posted 4/7/2007 4:13 PM by jonathan_camenisch

I was discussing with a friend recently how I really have to admit that I hate sermons. My friend seemed to feel they were probably biblical, although, to be fair, we did not discuss it much. Anyway, my wife did some quick research on the subject. I think that the facts she dug up generally show that the modern form of monologue preaching is not supported by the Bible or history. I was going to try to write up a convincing article myself, based on these facts, but since I get paid to administer Unix servers and not to write, I’ll just dump the facts onto this Unix server that Xanga runs for us and let you decide for yourself to agree with me.

So, in brief:

Deffinition of the word “sermon:”
The word “sermon” comes from a Middle English word which was derived from an
Old French term, which in turn came from the Latin word sermō;
(”discourse”). (Actually, it meant “conversation”, and early sermons were
delivered in the form of question and answer, only later did it come to mean
a monologue)

From Wikipedia ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sermon ):
The sermon takes center stage in Protestantism:
“Later the Reformation led to Protestant sermons, many of which defended the
schism with the Roman Catholic Church and explained beliefs about scripture,
theology and devotion. Since the distinctive doctrines of Protestantism held
that salvation was by faith alone, and convincing people to believe the
Gospel and place trust in God for their salvation through Jesus Christ was
the decisive step in salvation, in Protestantism the sermon and hymn came to
replace the Eucharist as the central act of Christian worship. To rouse
deeper faith in the churchgoers, rather than have them partake in a ritual,
was the goal of Protestant worship conditioned by these beliefs.”

Greek deffinition:
Gk 1256 (what Paul was doing while Eutychus fell asleep [quite literally])
1) to think different things with one’s self, mingle thought with thought
a) to ponder, revolve in mind
2) to converse, discourse with one, argue, discuss

From http://www.anabaptistnetwork.com/node/321
“Early Anabaptist congregations were distinguished from their Catholic or
Reformed contemporaries by the much greater freedom their members had to
participate actively in a learning community. There were monologue sermons,
but often a number of people made contributions. Questions were invited and
discussion took place. Gradually, as the tradition developed, a reversion to
the dominance of monologue preaching can be observed, but echoes of a more
communal approach remain, together with a conviction that God speaks through
many people, sharing their gifts and perspectives in a multi-voiced
community.”

From http://www.anabaptistnetwork.com/book/export/html/306
“Although the Anabaptists did not abandon sermons, they were wary of
monologues and critical of the lack of participation in the Catholic and
Protestant churches around them. They were outspoken about this issue and
argued from Scripture that something was wrong. An early Anabaptist tract
quoted Paul in I Corinthians 14 urging that all should contribute when the
church met together and complained: ‘When some one comes to church and hears
only one person speaking, and all the listeners are silent…who can or will
regard or confess the same to be a spiritual congregation?’ The reformers
had proclaimed the priesthood of all believers but the Anabaptists, their
contemporaries, were not impressed with what they found in the reformers’
churches. The monopoly of the Catholic priest seemed to have been replaced
by the monopoly of the reformed preacher. Experts were still disempowering
the congregation and hindering it from becoming mature.
Many Anabaptist congregations consciously moved away from the monologue
tradition towards a more interactive style with multiple participation and
dialogue.”

Other articles on the subject:

An emergent view:
http://www.anabaptistnetwork.com/node/356

Good article from an ex-Anglican:
http://www.anabaptistnetwork.com/node/157

Notes for The Problem with Preaching(with Biblical footnotes):
http://www.the-next-wave-ezine.info/issue93/index.cfm?id=16&ref=ARTICLES_DOING%20CHURCH_254

Just how far does the government need to go to protect our safety?

http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/space/02/19/asteroid.deflector.reut/index.html

Now the real question I have, is are there any blinking lights on any of those asteroids?

Posted 4/6/2007 5:17 PM

1 Comment:

Too bad CNN deleted the article…
Posted 4/7/2007 11:28 AM by midwifebethany